Essentials of Social Psychology (1920) Book

We sleep 6 to 12 hours a day, and 2 hours of our sleep we dream of something. Some said they are omens, some they are messages and sometimes people thought you were a son or daughter of something satanic. Everyone have different beliefs depending on the place we grow and develop culture. There are four ways to define a dream depending on our culture;

1. History, people have sought meaning in dreams or divination through dreams.
2. Physiologically as a response to neural processes during sleep
3. Psychologically as reflections of the subconscious
4. Spiritually as messages from gods, the deceased, predictions of the future, or from the Soul. - Wikipedia

Prophets also practice dream incubation, they sleep in a sacred place to receive a divine message from the above. For example the 55 prophets of the bible; they wrote prophetic works as God's tool to share to people his words, Nostradamus; the well-known prophet, and many more. Only few believe to the power of dream, people thought they were just fantasies of our mind to satisfy our sleep. But until now, the content and purpose of dreams are not yet understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history and the scientific study of dream is called oneirology - which came from the Greek word oneiros or dream and logia, the study of.

There were uncountable number of psychologist who already studied dream; one of them was Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist who emphasizes dream analysis. He introduce himself as a natural scientist rather than theoretical psychologist, he studied Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts; he was also important to divination and tarot reading. Reading books for tarot and divination, authors will always refer to his works and almost of his concept were used in numerology.

Jung's adviser, Sigmund Freud published a book that simply explains his own theory of meaning of dream, a part of psychoanalysis in which we understand ones people characteristic by giving meaning to their dreams. What make special to his work was, he uses his own dreams and client dreams, which are unnamed, that are easy to understand for the readers. A dream of one person is depending on its experience, explaining a whole dream can formulate hundreds or thousands of answers. It also depends on the ties or bond or connection between you and your own client. Sigmund Freud was the father of modern abnormal, just by looking to his picture - kidding.

According to Freud, a dream is a sum up of two main content. First, the manifest, is what a dreamer remembers upon waking and Lastly, latent, can be said to be coded. Since latent can be coded it was also subdivided by Freud according to its properties and he called it dream work (an idea merely existing in the region of possibility is replaced by a vision of its accomplishment, meaning, it changes a latent or complicated dream into a manifest).

1. Condensation - where several thoughts were combined.
2. Displacement - where a forbidden thought is transferred into a harmless substitute.
3. Symbolism - where concepts become a concrete image
4. Secondary Revision - where reconstructing of the dream material gives it the illusion of coherent.

This two terms are gradually used in the book and needed to be understand before you proceed reading it. They are also subdivided into classes; 1st class, meaning and intelligible; 2nd class, self-coherent and have a distinct meaning - this is the case when we dream, for instance, that some dear relative had died of plague when we know of no ground for expecting, apprehending, or assuming anything of the sort; 3rd class, incoherent, complicated and meaningless - almost of our dreams partake this group. They had unknown origin but simply manifest by condensation and displacement, which already stated above.

Once we agree with the meaning of a dream, Freud called it Dream Mechanism. Something with similarity, identity and agreement that produces unity to the dream and the dreamer. How do we really emphasizes a dream to produce unity, by simply following the steps above and lastly by dramatization, transformation of thought into a scene. A dream can be disguise as human desires.

To sum up Freud's idea of dream analysis, First, Freud pointed out constant connection between some part of every dream and some detail of the dreamer's life during the previous waking state. Second, every dream attempted or successfully gratification of some wishes, conscious or unconscious. Third, he proved that our dreams are symbolical that makes it transparent or unintelligible to the observer. Fourth, sexual desires play an enormous part in our unconscious. Lastly, a direct connection between dreams and insanity. Until now, psychologist still trying to discover human's function of dreams and uses it to psychoanalysis, taking a deep breath out of your blowing insanity.


Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in the Austrian Empire city of Freiberg. Freud was recognized as intellectually gifted at an early age an encouraged in academic pursuit by his Jewish parents, despite the family's limited means. His family moved to Vienna in 1860 and by the age of seventeen, Freud entered the University of Vienna, receiving his medical degree in 1881. He began practicing medicine as a neurologist in Vienna in 1886, the same year he married Martha Bernays. It is said that Freud's interest in dreams dated from an early age an that he kept a dream journal. By the last decade dated from the nineteenth century, he began making an intensive study of himself as the model for the explorations of personality development, memory, and dreams, which led to his revolutionary theories. Freud and his family left Austria for England shortly before World War II. In 1939, Freud died after a long struggle with cancer. - At the back of the book.

Rating - Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners by Sigmund Freud, 4 Sweets and the insanity that blows the mind of individuals. (At first place, by choosing this book as part of my book or journal report, before reading it I was interested with dreams. From my childhood nightmares until now, I can see that my desires are more powerful than the things that I wanted to overcome. According to the book, dreams are representing desires of human that inherit the mental and physical activities. It leads to insanity, for short. I'm not a psychology major student but I become more deeply attached to this subject because it answered my questions that are far from my own knowledge by reading and listening to discussion that are interesting. For example dreams, I thought, dream interpretation are for those people who deeply desired of understanding its divine meaning and not for scientific basis. But reading the book, it clearly shows that dreams were studied well by Freud and his people. Their are hundreds or maybe thousands of psychologist right now who studied psychoanalysis but the fact that a psychologist might only be a theological but they can be simply natural according to Jung.)

Challenges:
Book #43 for 2011
Book #27 for Off the Shelf!